Recently, there has been considerable interest towards creation and delivery of 3-D content. Encoding and decoding systems for TV and media formats suitable for 3-D features have been and are being developed. Exemplary imaging applications of such media formats can be found in stereoscopic and autostereoscopic displays, applications which involve processing and transmitting of information pertaining to a scene as viewed from multiple viewpoints. An image captured by viewing the scene from a viewpoint can be referred to as a view.
Information of the scene that is occluded by one view may be revealed by one or more other views. Various captured views of the scene can be utilized in predicting views not directly captured. Although the various views can be provided (e.g., for processing and coding) in their entirety for imaging and video applications, an increase in number of views to be processed and transmitted by a coding system is generally associated with an increase in number of bits and higher computational complexity involved in creation and delivery of 3-D content. Therefore, the creation and delivery of 3-D content takes into consideration what information (e.g., number of views as well as what information within each view) to provide to a coding system.